* * * * *

Commander Benedict wrote in the log:

_Fifty-four days out from Sol. Alpha Centauri has long since faded back
into its pre-blowup state, since we have far outdistanced the light
from its explosion. It now looks as it did two years ago. It_--

"Pardon me, Commander," Leicher interrupted, "But I have something
interesting to show you."

Benedict took his fingers off the keys and turned around in his chair.
"What is it, Doctor?"

Leicher frowned at the papers in his hands. "I've been doing some work
on the probability of that explosion happening just as it did, and I've
come up with some rather frightening figures. As I said before, the
probability was small. A little calculation has given us some
information which makes it even smaller. For instance: with a possible
error of plus or minus two seconds Alpha Centauri A began to explode
the instant we came out of ultradrive!

"Now, the probability of that occurring comes out so small that it
should happen only once in ten to the four hundred sixty-seventh
seconds."

It was Commander Benedict's turn to frown. "So?"

"Commander, the entire universe is only about ten to the seventeenth
seconds old. But to give you an idea, let's say that the chances of its
happening are _once_ in millions of trillions of years!"

Benedict blinked. The number, he realized, was totally beyond his
comprehension--or anyone else's.

"Well, so what? Now it has happened that one time. That simply means
that it will almost certainly never happen again!"

"True. But, Commander, when you buck odds like that and win, the thing
to do is look for some factor that is cheating in your favor. If you
took a pair of dice and started throwing sevens, one right after
another--_for the next couple of thousand years_--you'd begin to
suspect they were loaded."

Benedict said nothing; he just waited expectantly.

"There is only one thing that could have done it. Our ship." Leicher
said it quietly, without emphasis.

"What we know about the hyperspace, or superspace, or whatever it is we
move through in ultradrive is almost nothing. Coming out of it so near
to a star might set up some sort of shock wave in normal space which
would completely disrupt that star's internal balance, resulting in the
liberation of unimaginably vast amounts of energy, causing that star to
go nova. We can only assume that we ourselves were the fuze that set
off that nova."

Bene